Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

It allows for our integrations with SOA Suite via the API, which we've found to be very agile. We're also able to start integrating through some web services through the ABS system.

We now have a place that allows our integration to happen, whether that's through the agile API running that process or by having our web team develop something that reaches back into the database to grab data. This is important because we often have customers who come to our website to inquire about their orders. But because we don't have to keep two sets of data, we're able to just reach into the database to find out where the data is about customers' orders.

While the product is technically good, my biggest complaint is that there's a lack of the ability to find good support in the IT community for it. This isn't an issue with Oracle support, but rather with finding someone who manages it and who knows what's going on with it. It doesn't seem to be the usual Oracle product that really takes a bit of skill in order to manage it correctly. There's a market for SOA Suite administrators that's separate from regular DBAs. So that's my biggest complaint -- finding the right community support for it.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

It runs fine without any huge stability issues. It's when we try to use it with certain packages that we are trying to do around the AIP that we had some issues.

We haven't really had to scale it because we're not using it that much yet. We may have plans in the future to.

SOA Suite setup was fine as it installs per their instructions. Our biggest issue we had was with our API integration from agile to EBS. It took us several months to get that up and running correctly, with a lot of escalated Oracle support around that. It was a tough nut to crack but we eventually got there.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

There are different products that can do the same thing. Evaluate your requirements and if you have big plans for integration with Oracle, give it some thought.

We use it as middleware to interface between our financial application, which is JD Edwards, and the database, as well as to legacy systems. It serves a critical functionality of linking the applications together to provide us the data we need.

The error reporting can be improved. When you get an email saying that something has gone wrong or something is not complete, it isn't very intuitive. It has to go to a very technical person to be able to tell you what actually the error is and what you need to know about it.

The company has been using the product for about two years.

I would say it is and is not a stable solution, not because of a fault in the product, but because we have a combination of legacy systems and also modern ERP systems. The challenge has been with information moving between the interfaces. When you send information, it's a black box. You don't get a confirmation that information has come back, so it's asynchronous, whereas our applications are synchronous. The ongoing challenge is knowing whether your data been sent completely and accurately. We've had to work to build very good reporting at least. The biggest challenge is getting useful information to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

So far, it has been a scalable solution. The next few years will be the true test of it, but so far, it has been a scalable solution.

Because it's a transformation project program over several years, we have internal and external support. Resources are from Accenture, the service integrator, working with Oracle Managed Cloud Services and ADM. So far, so good.

I wasn't directly involved in the setup. Nonetheless, I would say it's as straightforward as it can be considering our environment.

I think about process, not solutions. Determine what you really want to do first. Then, once you have clearly determined what you want to do, determine your requirements. Once you have the requirements, then go find the solution that meets those requirements. Rather than thinking of the solution and trying to look backwards; does it fit? Know what you really want and then go find the product. You will rarely find a product that gives you 100%, but you might find one that gives you 80% of what you need, so determine what you can live with and what you can't live without.

When I’m selecting a vendor to work with, I don’t want any bait and switch, in the sense of promise and delivery. The space that we are in, that's the biggest challenge. Sales people always get a bad rep as they offer promises and then when the product is delivered, they say something like, "The product doesn't do that or you need to buy something else to get that." I’m looking for simple clarity on what you're delivering, what it can and cannot do. That upfront clarity and honesty is what I look for the most.

1. Easy to install and configure SOA 12c development environment by using SOA 12c new Quick Start Installer. There is no need to think of creating a database to store repository of SOA to use this particular installer. It is now possible to install and configure an environment for a developer under 30 to 45 minutes.
2. Number of changes in Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control with redesign of SOA dashboards to focus on consolidated view of faults and issues in system. It helps in troubleshooting and health check of a SOA system.
3. Enterprise Scheduler Service (ESS) is newly introduced in SOA 12c. It helps to schedule SOA components or services and manages the complete lifecycle of a job. It is now possible to schedule activation or deactivation of pooling adapters at specified time to optimize performance of system in peak hours.

I've been working with SOA 12c for over 1 year and it's previous version ,SOA 11g for over 3 years.

The deployment process is well documented and available on the OTN site. No issues observed apart of one observation of SOA managed server taking longer time to start. It appears to be a known bug in this SOA version. The issue was resolved by enforcing managed server to startup by adding startup parameter for IPv4(java.net.preferIPv4Stack=true)

It is a very stable product.

No issues noticed.

Excellent.

Excellent.

It is very easy to set up a development environment by using Quick Installer.

The effort and complexity remain same for traditional setup of production or test build as we used to have in it's previous version 11g.

The complexity increases with implementation of high availability environment in expected line.

In-house.

As a consultant working on both 11g and 12c , I will strongly recommend customers move to 12c as soon as possible and leverage the huge number of new features the product provides in the 12c version.

I guess connecting to any and every application. Different sources: it can be a file source, a database, a web service. It's a single source for integration.

I think it has already improved quite a bit. At the system level, when you are running a website, it should be easier to diagnose the source of problems, for example, why the CPU is high, and make the error logs and log files easier to work with to find why an issue happens. Sometimes the Java can be a bit tricky to diagnose the actual problem. I think probably this area can be improved.

I started in 2010, so for over six years now.

It's stable enough. It has its problems as with any other Java application. Java, you know, sometimes can go down; JVM crashes; it has stuck threads. So as with any Java applications, it has its fair share of minor issues; but it's getting better.

It is scalable.

The technical support was average. It's a complex product, so it really takes time before you can find someone who knows, or someone who can get the right answer that we are looking for, and sometimes you don't, even if it takes ages.

If you know it, it's straight forward. If you don't know it, it's rather complex and can be very tricky. If you haven't invested time, you will make mistakes. Then it is not very simple to get back and start again.

If you want to invest in this product, I recommend to go ahead and do it. If someone is starting ,start with the latest version. It version is a lot better than it used to be. Don't even look back at the old version.

• Pure play integration (ESB)
• Orchestration (BPEL)
• API Management (Rest Adapters, API manager, etc.)

We're an SI, so I can only comment on behalf of our customers. By implementing SOA, underpinned by Oracle SOA Suite, we have been able to help customers save thousands of dollars by optimizing business processes, shortening software development lifecycles by being more agile and reusing services, and APIs. Our business is able to deliver products to the market quicker and cheaper.

API Management and BPM both need work, but I believe Oracle is already working on this.

We've been using it since its inception, 10.3.x, so that's nine to 10 years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

There were no issues in v11.1.1.7, but in 12c, the very early releases were a bit unstable. However, with Oracle's new release cycles were able to release patches very quickly, and now v12.1.3.x and v12.2.1.x are very stable products.

There were issues scaling, but mainly because the customer didn't set up the product properly, and didn't do capacity planning properly. If the product is setup properly according to the right capacity design, it scales as expected.

7/10

The complexity of setup depends on the set up. For developers and/or development environments, setup is very simple. With SOA Quickstart, it only takes a few minutes to have SOA Suite and full IDE up and running. For production environments, it takes a bit longer. However, there are several ways including products that will automate full installation out-of-the-box.

Do proper capacity planning. Engage an expert in the field to assist in defining what the requirement is, what approach to follow when licensing (Oracle processors, named users, metered/unmetered if cloud), and then size to the actual needs throughout time. This approach will almost certainly result in much cheaper license costs, probably less than other competing products that have less flexibility when licensed.

We also looked at Mule ESB/CloudHub, TIBCO, and IBM. There were many reasons that we chose Oracle, including that it's a more robust and scalable product, more features, better future roadmap and product vision, better integration with Oracle Apps, and Oracle Cloud SaaS.

The following features of this product are the most valuable to me:

Integration to underlying applications and technologies via its OOTB adapters
Scalability of deployed solutions
Business Process Management (BPM)
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

For my most recent customer, we automated an accounts payable process that integrated four different ERPs into an approval process.

Customers experience issues standing up environments. Unless an experienced administrator is involved, having an environment that is clustered and load balanced requires quite a bit of time. There are third-party tools to automate this configuration, but there is nothing currently out of the box to ease difficulty the installation issues customers run into.

I have used this solution for 8+ years.

SOA has been stable through the years, other portions of the suite have had issues when they rolled out. Customer support is very responsive when issues are found and the product is stable.

Scalability is one of the strengths of the product. We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I know others with issues, but our experience has been that they have been outstanding. Escalations are handled timely and the expertise of the support techs we've been assigned has been outstanding.

I did not previously use a different solution. We works exclusively with Oracle SOA Suite.

This is a complex environment so unless an experienced administrator is involved, having an environment that is clustered and load balanced requires quite a bit of time. There are third-party tools to automate this configuration, but there is nothing currently out of the box to ease difficulty the installation issues customers run into.

The vendor team was not used. Full disclosure - I work for a consulting company and we were brought in to facilitate the BPM and integration aspects of the project.

Get training up front. Hire an experienced administrator. Bring in experienced consultants to help on the initial project to help mentor and provide best practices.

• Reusability of services
• Scalability

We have implemented SOA for many clients. The organizations are getting benefit as they are eliminating complex integration (point to point) among several legacy systems, and having a low cost solution. The reusability of services is a game changer because one of our clients is saving big money by eliminating extraneous legacy systems.

There is a dashboard available in SOA Suite, and it's called BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), however, very often, clients need more customization, and this is limited. I want more customization in BAM.

I've been using it for two years.

There are many issues in deployment, and it is an ongoing process of improvement in any product. We get support from Oracle to resolve these issues.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

There is a good customer support available and it depend on the severity of the issue.

Initial setup is straightforward and there is plenty of documentation available on the Oracle website to help you with it.

We have an in-house team that did it.

It is always good if there is a win-win situation for client and service providers, and there is definitely some room for improvement in this area.

There are many factors that meant we chose this product over others, including its low cost, variety of integration options, and virtualization through Oracle Service Bus.

Perform a proper requirement gathering and check where this product is best suited in your organization.

We are using Oracle SOA Suite for integration for both our internal and external systems. For the internal systems, we use a gateway to connect to it, and for the third party connections. We use Oracle SOA Suite for orchestration, transformation, and translation.

In Oracle SOA Suite some applications are not able to use REST, but it can support both SOAP and REST. You're able to integrate quite a lot of systems, which may not be able to in other solutions. You can also use XML and JSON. It is a standardizing type of tool. It doesn't matter whether I'm using JSON or XML, it can convert them.

After starting to use this solution your time to take products to production becomes a bit faster. I've learned to embrace new technologies and to take the opportunity to learn and make use of the new technologies that are there. For example, if you can reuse an API or a service, then it saves you a lot of development time and makes the teams deliver much faster.

Overall the solution is quite versatile.

The resiliency of this application can have problems with a downstream system., sometimes it's unable to recover quickly. You have to restart the services. However, this is most likely because I'm using an old version, which is 12.1.3, but if I upgrade to 12.2, then that will problem will be resolved. I'm in the process of thinking of upgrading it.

I have been using Oracle SOA Suite for approximately seven years.

Oracle SOA Suite is stable as long as you do the correct installation, with the architecture. It's good and very stable. I have quite a lot of services that run using it.

The solution is highly scalable because I'm using three nodes, three physical nodes, or virtual machines, and if I want to add a fourth one, I can add it very easily. You can add more nodes and more managed servers. We call them managed servers, without any downtime. We have more than one node, and maintenance becomes very easy. If your architecture is done well everything will work perfectly. For example, installing the solution on at least two nodes for higher availability is scalable.

We have approximately 300 services running and the number of users can vary. The user count can vary because different applications can call the same service, we reuse these services. For example, at any one time, we could have approximately 50,000 messages passing through in about 10 minutes every ten minutes.

The technical support is good, we have premier support which costs extra.

We previously have not used another similar solution.

The installation can be straightforward if you follow the right guidance from Oracle. The infrastructure needs to be properly done.

The full implementation took use approximately one year, but it was because we have a  disaster recovery(DR) site also. We had to install it on both sides. We installed it on the DR site, used it, then copied it onto the DC site, the goal was for it to be faster.

We used Oracle consulting services for the implementation, they are very good.

We have at least four infrastructure engineers working on the support of the solution because you need people shadowing each other. Four should be good.

You will need an infrastructure person because it runs on WebLogic. Another person who can set up the infrastructure, and someone else who can work on the Oracle SOA Suite, which involves many services. Your security team needs to get involved too, they are part of this project. However, there are only two main technical people involved, infrastructure and product person.

We have evaluated other options.

I would recommend others to use Oracle SOA Suite, it's a great product. Now that we have the cloud solution, if your other products are in the cloud, then you can implement the cloud-based version. Most of my applications are on-premise, and that is why I am using the on-premise version. I would recommend the solution to anyone who wants stable, scalable, very versatile, and resilient, integration software.

I rate Oracle SOA Suite an eight out of ten.